Ingraham did not directly address the advertiser boycott her show is facing.
Fox News host Laura Ingraham was not in a diplomatic mood on Monday night during her first show back after a weeklong vacation, which followed an advertiser backlash to a tweet she sent mocking Parkland, Florida, high school student David Hogg.
Instead of repeating the apology she made on Twitter following the initial blowback to her tweet, Ingraham spent much of the show attacking "the bullies on the left aiming to silence conservatives."
"For all their talk of inclusion, the left doesn’t invite more voices to enter the public discussion," the pugnacious host said. "Instead, they drive out any dissenting voice. ... There is a contraction of free speech all around us."
Beyond one mention of the "Soros-funded Media Matters," a sworn enemy of the network's hosts, Ingraham did not specify any particular players on the left. And she never directly identified herself as the conservative being muzzled. But it was clear from watching that Ingraham was talking indirectly about the effort to get her booted from the network.
The closest she came to discussing her current predicament was mentioning that a "boycott" is one tool used by the political left — or, in her words, "left-wing retaliatory hit squads" — to silence conservatives.
At the end of her show, Ingraham announced a new recurring segment on her show called "Defending the First." The point of the segment, she said, is to "expose the enemies of the First Amendment."
The content of Ingraham's show was only one piece of the puzzle. Many Fox News watchers were curious to see how many advertisements would run during her program, considering that more than a dozen companies have so far pulled their ads from her show. Kantar Media, a research firm, will release data on Ingraham's ad load on Tuesday morning.
Ingraham's lead-in, Sean Hannity, who has been embroiled in his own kerfuffle, was in a joking mood when handing off to his colleague. "Welcome back. We missed you," he said. "I haven't read anything about you. It's like you've been missing in action."